Electronic content can be created and edited by various content editing applications. In many circumstances, content that is created using such applications includes objects or other parts that are of differing types. For example, a piece of content may include both vector graphics and bitmap graphics. Some photo editing and bitmap editing applications allow the editing of vector graphics but restrict such use to only on vector layers of a multi-layer piece of content. In such cases, although the application can be used to edit both bitmap and vector graphics, the application requires that each whole layer is either bitmap or vector and not a combination of both.
More generally, the use of multiple types of graphics within a piece of content often requires launching separate editing tools to allow editing of the different types of graphics. For example, many content editing applications, including many vector graphics based editing applications, launch external applications for bitmap editing. A vector graphics editing application may allow the inclusion of a bitmap graphic on an editing canvas and allow high-level adjustments (e.g., size, scale, adjustments, etc.) of the bitmap object, but require launching a separate application to edit the actual pixels of the bitmap (e.g., to set the colors of the pixels and the pixel resolution). Launching a separate application to edit such a bitmap can have numerous drawbacks including, but not limited to, preventing the bitmap from being edited in the context of the other objects with which it is being used. Similarly, transformations and other high-level changes made to the bitmap in the outer editing application may get disabled when entering a bitmap-editing mode. Generally, editing applications that allow bitmap editing often offer only a limited set of editing tools and can remove the image from the global document context when switching to the bitmap-editing mode.